Metaheart :)

Sorry guys for being so quiet and for the lack of updates on the animation - it's going hard :( Especially since I got distracted again, but I promise it's for the greater good! :)

Unreal 5.8 was released a month ago and I decided to give MetaHumans a try. Since their first reveal years ago, I've found them more attractive and realistic than Daz models. You can go very far tuning Daz characters, but they have their limits.

Creating my own characters was always on my mind, and it was my dream to create my OC some day. But my lack of technical skills and knowledge kept me away. I did my Lune model some time ago, but it was pretty bad. So I decided to try again with MetaHuman, as the system and surrounding tools have gotten much better over the years.
They're much higher poly than Daz, have crazy good facial expressions and an absolutely mind-blowing open rig system. They're not ideal of course, and the body needs a lot of work to bring in that Daz sexiness, accumulated over the years by horny artists :)

Well, I got waaaaaaaaaay deeper into the rabbit hole than I anticipated - and I'm actually glad :) A few tests turned into a full-fledged Daz-to-MetaHuman conversion addon lol :) I learned so much about Blender and different techniques - I finally got my head around skin shaders, texture transfer, and I'm a Wrap3D professor now :)

Of course I started with our beloved Shadowheart. She came out gorgeous! :)
i'll take her for some test renders and see what she can do.

One character is good, but if I want to convert more characters or create my own, I needed a way to automate things. That's what MetaHuman Tools is shaping up to be. I can convert any Daz character to MH now in an almost fully automatic way, in just a few clicks. It took me weeks to build, but damn, I know Blender so much better now.

Still a lot to cover and figure out, still not fully understand how to add genitails for example :)
But now im pretty confident in my skills and ability to leverage all what Metahumans can offer and create amazing characters!